


Into the Barn

by LemuelCork



Category: Haven - Fandom
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 17:36:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,910
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/600374
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LemuelCork/pseuds/LemuelCork
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>We've reached the end of Season 3 and it's time for Audrey to go into the barn. Duke doesn't want her to go; Nathan doesn't want her to go. But she has to.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Into the Barn

**Author's Note:**

  * For [koanju (verstehen)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/verstehen/gifts).



“Really?” Audrey says, and shakes her arms loose from Nathan’s grip. It isn’t hard; he isn’t really trying to hold her back. But he’s occupied her long enough that Duke is now at the door. At the door with one hand on the wood and one foot over the threshold. He looks back at her and the look in his eyes—that’s what stops her. Her first thought is that it’s a look she hasn’t seen before, one she’d never expected to see on this man’s face, so carefully masked with humor, with bravado, with smartassery, with anything opaque enough to hide honest emotion. But that isn’t true. She’s seen this look before. In the middle of the night, in a hotel room in Colorado, and it stops her cold.

“You aren’t going in alone,” he tells her. “And you aren’t going in first.”

“It’s my responsibility,” she says, stepping toward him. “It’s my...barn.”

“We don’t know what it is,” Nathan says softly. “All we know is, it wiped the other Audrey’s memories, and once every twenty-seven years it wipes yours.”

“I’m supposed to go in,” Audrey says. “To stop the Troubles.” Some distance overhead, a streak against the purple, a meteor speeds by, vanishing behind a stand of trees. They’re coming faster now. 

“If I don’t remember anything when I come out,” Duke says, to Nathan. “Remind me I think you’re a prick.” He grins, wanly. And steps inside.

#

Into what? It hardly seems like a building at all, more like a plaza. He can’t see walls; he can’t even see the door he just stepped through. Looking up he can’t see a roof, but then he can’t see meteors streaking by either, so that’s something. The sound of footsteps behind him makes him turn.

“You’re not the first,” says Agent Howard. “In case you’re wondering.”

“The first what?” Duke asks. Howard’s wearing the same suit he had on when he came to the Cape Rouge that time. Does he own another? Or does he own a dozen, all identical? Feds, Duke thinks, disdainfully. But this man is something worse than a Fed. Maybe something worse than a man.

“The first...friend who has tried to protect her, by going in ahead of her. It does no good. But you keep trying.”

“Well, you know what they say, if at first you don’t succeed...” Duke isn’t listening to himself talk, he’s just filling the silence, trying to distract Howard while he glances around looking for some sign of where he is, something he could use as a weapon...anything. But he’s got nothing.

Agent Howard puts a hand lightly on Duke’s arm. “What are you looking for? The way out?”

“For Audrey,” Duke says, and realizes as his voice breaks on her name that it isn’t the glib comeback he meant it to be. “The way out for—for Audrey,” but Howard is shaking his head.

“There isn’t one,” he says. “Come with me,” and walks off toward a slightly paler portion of the space, a spot where the fog surrounding them thins a bit. Duke hustles after him, not wanting to risk letting him get out of sight.

They turn a corner—corner of what? Duke can’t tell, but it’s a corner—and suddenly there’s the door, the wall, but the door’s standing open and Nathan and Audrey aren’t beyond it. There’s a man and there’s a woman, but they’re dressed like summer-stock actors doing Colonial Williamsburg schtick, all rough-hewn woolens and wire spectacles. She’s on her knees, weeping, and he’s cradled in her arms, and Duke realizes with a start that it’s Agent Howard, and that he’s dying. His eyes are open but rolled back in his head and his body is trembling. 

“Don’t,” the woman is saying, “don’t you dare leave me. Do you hear me? Don’t you leave me, Howard Holloway, not like this. Not like this.”

“Holloway,” Duke says, one index finger rising in the air like he’s adding things up. “Like Roland Holloway...? Like the Holloway house?” But Agent Howard—the Howard in modern dress, the one standing beside him—says nothing, just stands with his arms folded. “What does this have to do with Audrey?” 

Howard nods toward the woods, and Duke sees a figure moving through the trees. More woolens, a bonnet, he can’t see her face, not yet, but he has a feeling he’ll recognize it when he does. And then she breaks out into the clearing and the sight of her is like a blade slicing through him, right down to the bone. This isn’t Audrey, any more than in 1955 Sarah was Audrey, any more than in the present day Audrey is Audrey—this woman has another name, surely, other memories, another life. But it’s her. It’s her face. Those are her eyes staring right through him like he’s invisible—which he supposes he very well might be, Haven being Haven. That’s her face, and that’s genuine terror in it, and his heart seizes in his chest at the sight. Where has Howard brought him? _When_ has he brought him? Something tells him this is no summer-stock reenactment he’s watching, and that Agent Howard is quite a bit older than he looks. Hell, if he’s Roland Holloway’s...what, ancestor...? If he is, how many generations would have had to pass to get from here to there, from a man who looks like Howard to one who looked the way Holloway did in those mirrors, in that horrible house that trapped them and almost killed them on Halloween? And forget what the men look like, how about what they have under the hood? The curse they presumably share, a man sucked out of his body and bound to inhabit a building, to _be_ a building, that house in Roland Holloway’s case, this barn in Howard’s. For years, for decades, for centuries...for eternity?

Duke whirls, grabs Howard by the lapels of his suit, pushes him back against the doorway. “What is this? What are you showing me?”

“I wanted to stop the Troubles,” Howard said. His hands come up, he stares at his palms, his fingers. “I built this barn. Plank by plank. Each connected to the next with words of power.” He looks over at Duke, ready to counter cynicism, sarcasm, doubt, but he doesn’t get any and it silences him for a moment. “Words of power. That’s what we called them back then. The Micmaq had their own term for it, but I never learned their language. None of us did. But we used what we did learn from them. I used it.”

On the ground before them, both women are now kneeling, but it’s too late, for the man’s body has stopped trembling, has stopped moving altogether.

“I lost my father; he lost his. I knew I couldn’t stop myself from...going away, like they did. But I could make it serve a purpose. Or I thought I could.”

Almost like a pantomime, it plays out before them: the look of sorrow on the grieving woman’s face, of horror on Audrey’s as the dead man’s body starts to fade, grow pale and then translucent, then there’s nothing on the ground but the man’s clothing. The body is gone. And the widow—were they married? and is that a pregnancy rounding the middle of the woman’s skirts as she stands?—approaches Audrey with rage in her eyes. 

“They said you could save him. They said you could!” Audrey is shaking her head, backing away toward them, toward the door. A cold wind blows out of the barn from behind them, though Duke only half feels it, almost as if the cold air is blowing _through_ them rather than against them.

And suddenly it’s not just rage burning in the widow’s eyes, there’s something more there, an actual glow, like from a fire deep within, a furnace stoked with loss and love and bitterness. Duke has seen the eyes of the Troubled before—hell, in his own mirror, when he goes all silver-eyed and super-strengthy. He knows something bad is coming and reaches out toward Audrey, this Audrey who is not Audrey but who is only inches away and so clearly needs his help. But Howard shakes his head. “She can’t see you, or feel you. You can’t affect what you see here.”

“What _is_ this?” Duke hollers.

“Memory,” Agent Howard says. And in that instant a sound comes from the bereft woman’s throat, a deep rumbling growl no human throat should be capable of producing, and words are spoken, but not in any human tongue—words of power, Duke imagines, if words of power exist, this is surely what they would sound like—and Audrey is lifted off the ground, struggling, legs kicking in the air. 

“Don’t. Please,” she says. “He wouldn’t want you to do this—”

“Yes he would,” the woman says. “It is what he wanted. It’s what he told me to do. I begged him not to make me—” 

“You don’t have to—”

But she apparently feels she does, because Audrey rises higher off the ground and then goes spinning backwards through the barn’s door, through _them_ , right through Duke standing there. _“I curse you,”_ the widow says, her voice going all guttural again, and all Duke can think is, he’s never heard the word ‘curse’ spoken quite that way before, to mean it, to do it, like putting a signature on a contract, like hammering a nail in a coffin. Like cutting a throat. _“Until you bring him back to me.”_ And then, more bitter still: _“Or until you kill the man_ you _love.”_

And the barn door slams shut.

#

Duke looks around the barn for Audrey, but she’s nowhere to be seen. What’s more, Agent Howard has taken a powder himself. It’s just Duke, all by his lonesome, standing in a space that for now looks entirely ordinary. There’s the roof, there are the walls. There’s the door. And through it—

“Duke? Duke!”

It’s Audrey’s voice, and when he opens the door they’re both standing there, just as he left them, Audrey and Nathan, and it’s Nathan who asks, “What is it? What’s in there?”, and for once Duke doesn’t know what to say, the words just won’t come.

He looks from one of them to the other, registers the concern in Nathan’s eyes, and more than concern, the longing for another way out, for not losing Audrey, and he knows from the way Nathan’s looking at him that his own eyes are giving just as much away.

He glances down. Giving things away is not Duke Crocker’s style. Not to Nathan, and not to Audrey, not right now.

“Duke?” Audrey says. “Talk to us.”

And when he doesn't Nathan says, “I’ll go in.” He starts to push past, but Duke stops him. He knows Nathan can’t feel the hand he’s pressing against his chest, but he can’t ignore it either. He stops, stares daggers at his old rival. “What?”

“First of all,” Duke says, “you’re a prick.”

Was that a smile on Audrey’s face? For the briefest of moments, the ghost of a smile. It flickers out.

“And second of all?” Nathan says.

“Agent Howard is in there,” Duke says. “And either we find a way to get him out, permanently, or...”

“Or?”

“Or,” Duke says, “one of the two of us is going to have a very bad day.”

#


End file.
